He flushed for pleasure of conscious desert, but he had to laugh and turn it off lightly. “I don't think I could come for that. But I'll look in to see Idella unprofessionally.”
He drove away, and she remained at her door looking up at the summer blue sky that held a few soft white clouds, such as might have overhung the same place at the same hour thousands of years before, and such as would lazily drift over it in a thousand years to come. The morning had an immeasurable vastness, through which some crows flying across the pasture above the house sent their voices on the spacious stillness. A perception of the unity of all things under the sun flashed and faded upon her, as such glimpses do. Of her high intentions, nothing had resulted. An inexorable centrifugality had thrown her off at every point where she tried to cling. Nothing of what was established and regulated had desired her intervention; a few accidents and irregularities had alone accepted it. But now she felt that nothing withal had been lost; a magnitude, a serenity, a tolerance, intimated itself in the universal frame of things, where her failure, her recreancy, her folly, seemed for the moment to come into true perspective, and to show venial and unimportant, to be limited to itself, and to be even good in its effect of humbling her to patience with all imperfection and shortcoming, even her own. She was aware of the cessation of a struggle that has never since renewed itself with the old intensity; her wishes, her propensities, ceased in that degree to represent evil in conflict with the portion of good in her; they seemed so mixed and interwoven with the good that they could no longer be antagonised; for the moment they seemed in their way even wiser and better, and ever after to be the nature out of which good as well as evil might come.
As she remained standing there, Mr. Brandreth came round the corner of the house, looking very bright and happy.
“Miss Kilburn,” he said abruptly, “I want you to congratulate me. I'm engaged to Miss Chapley.”
“Are you indeed, Mr. Brandreth? I do congratulate you with all my heart. She is a lovely girl.”
“Yes, it's all right now,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I've come to tell you the first one, because you seemed to take an interest in it when I told you of the trouble about the Juliet. We hadn't come to any understanding before that, but that seemed to bring us both to the point, and—and we're engaged. Mother and I are going to New York for the winter; we think she can risk it; and at any rate she won't be separated from me; and we shall be back in our little home next May. You know that I'm to be with Mr. Chapley in his business?”
“Why, no! This is great news, Mr. Brandreth! I don't know what to say.”
“You're very kind,” said the young man, and for the third or fourth time he wrung her hand. “It isn't a partnership, of course; but he thinks I can be of use to him.”
“I know you can!” Annie adventured.
“We are very busy getting ready—nearly everybody else is gone—and mother sent her kindest regards—you know she don't make calls—and I just ran up to tell you. Well, good-bye!”